Since we launched support for dynamic content in Amazon CloudFront last year, customers have increasingly used the service not just to deliver static objects, but also as a way to improve performance, reliability and security of their entire website. Today, we are excited to announce two more features – Custom SSL Certificates and zone apex support – that make it easier for you to accelerate and deliver your whole website using Amazon CloudFront.

Custom SSL Certificate support lets you deliver content over HTTPS using your own domain name and your own SSL certificate. This helps give visitors to your website lower latency and higher reliability along with the security benefits of CloudFront over an SSL connection that uses your own domain name. You can also configure CloudFront to use HTTPS connections for origin fetches so that your data is encrypted end-to-end from your origin to your end users.

Configuring Custom SSL Certificate support is easy; you don’t need to learn any proprietary code or hire any consultants to configure it for you. Starting today, you can sign up for an invitation to use the Custom SSL Certificate feature by filling out the form on the custom SSL certificate feature page. As soon as we approve your request, you can upload your SSL certificate and use the AWS Management Console to associate it with your CloudFront distributions.

Pricing for Custom SSL Certificates is simple. We charge a fixed monthly fee for each custom SSL certificate you associate with your CloudFront distributions, pro-rated by the hour. As with other CloudFront features, you pay only for what you use and there are no upfront fees or minimum monthly commitments. You can learn more about Custom SSL Certificates by reading the Amazon CloudFront Developer Guide.

Also, starting today you can now use Amazon CloudFront to deliver content from the root domain, or "zone apex" of your website. For example, you can now configure both http://www.example.com and http://example.com to point at the same CloudFront distribution, without the performance penalty or availability risk of managing a redirect service. To use this feature, you create an Amazon Route 53 Alias record to map the root of your domain to your CloudFront distribution. There are no extra fees from Route 53, as Alias queries that are mapped to a CloudFront distribution are provided free of charge. You can start using this feature today by reviewing the Amazon Route 53 Developer Guide.

Learn more about custom SSL certificate and zone apex support by visiting the custom SSL certificate feature page. You can also join our webinar at 10:00 AM Pacific (UTC-7) on June 20th, 2013 to learn more about these features for whole site delivery using Amazon CloudFront and Amazon Route 53.